I mentioned in Monday’s post that we were planning on getting rid of all the alarm wires running through our walls and hanging down around our windows. Well, we did it! Sorry this isn’t the most exciting of posts, but wow does it feel good to not be looking at this anymore:

Basically the removal process was pretty simple since we got the go-ahead from our electrician to give ’em the snip snip. Here were my tools of choice:

I used those clippers to cut the wires and pull them out where they were just loose on the other end. The ones that I couldn’t pull out, I snipped them as close to the hole in the wall as I could and pushed the rest into the hole. Most were attached to the wall/trim in various places with some heavy duty staples, which is when the pliers came in handy.

Once I had the staples removed and the wire completely detached, I was still left with some pretty scarred walls. In the picture below you can see one of the nickle-sized holes, and the old paint where the alarm wire had been painted over.

Spackle to the rescue! This was my first time spackling and I’ll admit, it is my idea of a good time! It’s the consistency of fluffy frosting/whipped cream cheese, and you just use a putty knife and smear it on. There’s different types of spackle, we just picked up one that the guy at Home Depot suggested, and it seems to have worked fine so far.

So below is one of the holes with a very detailed step by step spackling process.

By the time you’ve let the first layer dry and done that second application, it’ll look more like this:

I still need to sand it, but that can wait til another day. My main goal was to finish all the spackling in one go so that the little pot of it didn’t dry up on me.

I also had some big kahuna holes to address. One where I removed the rest of the alarm control system in our closet:

And one hiding behind my bedside table.

Luckily neither of these holes were in places that were super noticeable, so my patching didn’t have to be great. I bought one of those mesh drywall patches from Home Depot and cut it to size for each hole (I still have some leftover if we have any other holes to deal with).

These patches are self adhesive, so it just stuck to the wall (popcorn and all).

And here it is after a couple layers of spackle. It’s still a little crazy looking but at least we don’t have a gaping hole in our wall!

Then I had this mess behind my bedside table to deal with. It was a little harder to patch because it was so close to the baseboards.

But now that I’m a spackling pro (haha) the hole is no more!

However, we were not yet free of our alarm system remnants. We still had sensors hanging out on our previously-wired windows.

So I yanked at them with my pliers til they finally detached and I was left with a backing/residue still stuck to the window. Awesome. Pretty those sensors had been stuck there for about 20 years because this stuff did not want to detach.

Finally I removed all the residue but what it left behind was still pretty unattractive. Bleh. (Note, on some windows I did this before actually spackling, which is why you still see a big hole in the wall.)

I’ve so far removed/scraped off about half of the remaining sensors on our eleven previously-wired windows (some in the house weren’t wired so I caught a break, yay!).

Now that our wires are removed and the old alarm system is *almost* a thing of the past (still have to finish those last few sensors), we are just about ready to finish painting! It’s on our to-do list for this weekend, so come Monday I hope to have an awesome before and after for y’all!

Comments

yurrabazain

My experience with the mesh hole screens are that I never can sand the area smooth, there’s always a bump in the wall, or some texture peaking through. Did you have that problem too? (If not, I’d love some tips!)

If you ever have a huuge (HUGE) hole, larger than the mesh patch kind of hole, try drywall clips and a small piece of drywall. We had one such “big kahuna” (haha) holes in our ceiling, when one of our friends stepped off a beam in the attic crawl space and nearly fell through. He was helping us wire our kitchen. I’ve almost done the same installing ceiling span braces for our first bedroom ceiling fan. We used drywall clips and cut drywall to size, then mudded repeatedly (like with spackle), but because you can set the drywall patch piece flush, it leaves a pretty smooth look after careful mudding and sanding. For future. =D

Katelyn

Ah yes that sounds like a much better solution!!! My patches are definitely NOT smooth. But since they’re both in places that won’t ever really be seen I don’t mind. We almost stepped through our ceiling sooooo many times when we were prepping for blowing insulation for a whole week! I’m honestly very surprised that we didn’t. That’s really good to know though about using pieces of drywall to patch. We have some big holes in our garage walls where we’ll probably need to do that